Life CV

I have discovered recently that work has a habit of imitating love. For the last few years I have had a handful of jobs that I’ve loved and thoroughly enjoyed - even though at times it was hard work and more than a little stressful! Along the way I have been fortunate enough to even make some great mates. Additionally there was a decent reward for undertaking this vast array of tasks, which always helps.

I’ve developed and grown along the way. I have shared new experiences and each job has taught me some new skills as well as refining those I already possess. In fact some have taught me that I was able to do things I never expected or thought I’d be capable of! I’ve amassed a fairly credible, some would say impressive (albeit not ground breaking) CV full of experience. That is perhaps where I got a little ahead of myself and dared to believe my own hype, a dangerous thing to be sure. I had a job I was thoroughly enjoying. I loved my colleagues. The day to day grind was nothing that I couldn’t handle. Was it all too easy and comfortable or was I just at ‘happy’? Surely I needed a real challenge with matching significant reward, a chance to make a name for myself perhaps. My head was turned to a sparkly small consultancy that promised the earth. They don’t say “the grass is always greener on the other side” for nothing you know!

The challenge was short lived, the work was laborious with little enjoyment and no fine, glamorous end product, the people lacked the spark of past teams and after a painful, muddy slog there were cut backs and finally redundancy.

To see former colleagues happy, forging ahead without me gave pangs of jealousy and a bitter taste of regret, a new experience for me. A three month gap without work was utterly soul destroying and I found that having swallowed my pride I would do anything. I found myself applying for all sorts, did some manual labour for a friend, a series of temp jobs where I was in, worked and gone before people learned my name. Finally when I had something ‘permanent’ it was far from what I expected or wanted it to be. Shiny and new, promising so much on the face of it but the devil is in the detail and the description belied the content. Dull, tedious drudgery, filling long periods of nothing to do and little to say with surfing the net and awaiting the next pay packet. No creativity. No fun.

I’m 30 next month. It’s not mid-life crisis time, my biological clock isn’t ticking since fortunately being a man, it’s digital. But if I want to carve out that truly key role it’s time to stop temping isn’t it? It’s time to find a role that suits me, and I suit it again. So I have started a bit of a search and the best way to do that? In this climate the chances of getting head-hunted are pretty slim. It used to be the case of scouring the papers but now??? It’s all online! After a small period of wallowing and self pity, I’ve decided to sign up, upload my details and see what I can find. Wish me luck.